New Camera ?

With a little bit of Christmas magic it's my time to buy a new digital camera. Charles If I remember right yours is a Olympus 3040? There is also a 5050 ? Important to me is zoom, fast sequence shots and quality of images. I could care less of the mpeg movie features unless that means I can freeze a shot Now a little bit of magic help from my friends please.

So ya wanna go to the Casino? That's where I won enough to buy my new skis, bindings, skins etc. ;D ;D

I been researching the matter as well, Robman, but the technology is changing faster than I can make up my mind!

Robie,<br><br>We have a digi Olympus and have been very happy with it. There is wide array of cameras on the market but the thing I would consider with a new purchase is the zoom function. Olympus also makes a 500 zoom or something that I would consider. Our next digi will be a SLR so I have been looking more at that market.<br><br>Good luck and post some photos.

I also have an Olympus digital, C2040, which, of course, being a year old is out of production and has been replaced with something better and less expensive. I'm very happy with it, however. I mainly wanted it for getting photos onto my web site, so I didn't need big Mpixels (it is 2 Mpixels, 1600x1200 max). You only need big Mpixels if you mainly want to print your photos, as you have to reduce the pixel size of big photos to get them to fit on a single computer screen anyway. I almost never use mine at 1600x1200.<br><br>The camera has good quality optics (watch out for the really cheap small Mpixel cameras), and far more control over taking photos than any SLR I could ever dream of in my slide-taking days. Motor drive (bursts of 8 frames at about 1/sec); auto, manual (to 16sec), and aperture- and shutter-priority exposure modes; exposure biasing; exposure-locking for multiple photos (panoramas); white balance adjustment; you can even vary the output of the flash +/- 2 stops!<br><br>When I was looking a year ago, most of the compact 2Mpixel models didn't offer so much control, and many took only jpegs, which leads to lower quality images if you need to "photoshop" the photo and then re-jpeg it. I have found, after about 5000 photos, that almost all shots can benefit, often greatly, from photoshopping, mainly adjusting the contrast (levels control). This is especially true when the scene is low contrast to begin with - shady slopes, overcast skies. If a shot is underexposed, even grossly, it can almost always be rescued (overexposed digital shots seem to be just like overexposed film shots - can't be rescued).<br><br>My camera has 3x optical zoom, 40-120mm (ignore the digital zoom number - useless). Not the biggest telephoto, but by taking a larger photo (say 1024x768) and then cropping in photoshop down to web size, it is like having additional zoom without degrading quality.<br><br>Get yourself some rechargable nickel-metal hydride batteries (AA hopefully) and a big flash memory card or two and you'll be all set!

Robman,<br>It's worth a trip to CompUSA B-4 you make any final decisions. <br>They have a very wide selection, the newest models and (believe it or not) a salesperson (usually) that is reasonably up to speed on their cameras and digicams. <br>My list of needs remains fairly constant:<br>1. As small in size as possible (and still have the zoom)<br>2. A minimum of 6X OPTIC zoom (I find digital zoom useless for action shots)<br>3. Multiple burst exposures<br>4. AA batteries (so I cane use lithiums; but that's probably another topic)<br>I'm reasonably sure that with the features 2 and 3 one will get most of the other "techie" stuff that Charles is suggesting. My current dinosaur has all that stuff.<br>I've just noticed the last trip I took up to CompUSA that there was a marked increase in the # of 6X & higher optical zoom units to choose from.<br>Budget permitting (double the price?) one might also look into small digital movie cameras. I still want to do some research on them. JVC has one that's not much bigger than a pack of (long) cigarettes; almost all of them seem to have 10X optical zoom and the ability to take still pics in a burst mode. Tim Place knows a lot about them. We should get him to comment.<br>So that's about all I've got to say on the matter (for now )<br>